Dan's Papers - June 13, 2008

Next week, we here on this part of the planet experience the longest day of the year. We get the most sunshine. And the least night. Before science figured all this out, there were lots of superstitions about why this was. Was it something we had done? Was a god angry? Or maybe he was happy, giving us all this sunshine. In England in ancient times, women would wash their faces on this day because with all the sunshine, they thought it made them look better. (It does.) There was a superstition that if you ran naked in the grass of the morning dew, it would enable fertility for the coming year. There was a superstition that if you burned herbs on a bonfire on the day of the summer solstice, it would keep your livestock healthy.

Those were the days.

In the last 700 years, various wise men and women, using telescopes, mathematics and other tools have come to figure out what is really going on here. These must have been very giddy times for scientists. They discovered the earth was a sphere and not flat like a sheet. They discovered the earth spins and moves around the sun, and then puzzling over the meaning of the summer solstice, they discovered the axis the earth spins on is tipped slightly in relation to the sun.

Finally, looking at all this really, really closely, they discovered that the earth does not make a perfect circle when going around the sun, but rather a sort of elipse. And furthermore, and this might have really frightened them at first, the earth wasn't even on a perfect axis - it actually wobbled on its axis a slight bit. (The solstice this year is on June 20, not June 21, which is an oddity. It is caused by the wobble.) What might happen if the planet should fall over?

Probably the most frightening bit of news was that the whole shebang - the sun and the earth, and now it turned out there were a bunch of other planets that were revolving around the sun, too - were all headed somewhere through the ethos at a very, very high speed. As this is written, nobody knows exactly where we are all going. Or even if there is a "where." So far, it seems, we haven't even figured out if "where" is an appropriate question. In fact, now it is beginning to seem that we are raising more questions than we are answering. Maybe - and this is REALLY scary - we humans are just not smart enough to figure all this out, which is a thought that brings us right back into the laps of the religious leaders, who say, "We've been telling you all along that this stuff is just a big mystery - and only God knows the absolute truth."

Well, we down here on earth, walking around on the surface of the planet, have our own little troubles. Here in the Hamptons, for reasons that apparently got set up wrong in the first place by some people a long time ago, the summer solstice does not coincide with the summer season. If it had been done properly, our three-month-long summer season would begin on May 5, and end on August 5.

Wait a minute. This doesn't account for the fact that things take a long time to heat up or cool down. And we're talking pretty big events here, from our little perspective. The giant ocean takes almost three months after the solstice for its temperature to begin to drop. The highest air temperature we get happens in August. So, it's not like a teapot coming to a boil in just a few minutes.

Maybe the season is where it ought to be then. I take back what I said.

Ever wonder why the planets revolving around the sun aren't bigger closest to the sun and smaller the further out they go? Or if it's the other way around? Ever wonder why only one of the planet has rings around it? Ever wonder about that? Huh?

As this is written, we've got a metal contraption sitting on Mars digging a hole looking for signs of life. Of course there is life on Mars. And if this contraption doesn't find it, it's because it is not digging down far enough. Here on earth two weeks ago, digging down deep into our planet toward our core - what do you know - there are little bugs and worms living there. Who knew?

Well, one thing is true, and that is that we are the first species in history to ever screw up the atmosphere of a planet because we were smart enough to invent fun things that emitted gasses, but we were not smart enough to know when to put those inventions in a closet.

They say if you go for a walk in the woods and approach a fern leaf backwards without looking, and then collect the seed spores without touching the leaf, you'll have the power to make yourself invisible.